Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? The first two clues require you to know a little bit about different alphabets. Read on for all the answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Letter after alpha, in the Greek alphabet
Answer: BETA

5A clue: Letter after Alfa, in the NATO phonetic alphabet
Answer: BRAVO

6A clue: Barrier reef organism
Answer: CORAL

7A clue: Bout of sniffling and sneezing, say
Answer: COLD

8A clue: Blue expanse
Answer: SKY

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: “Babbling” body of water
Answer: BROOK

2D clue: Before expected
Answer: EARLY

3D clue: Broadcast commercial, for short
Answer: TVAD

4D clue: Big name in early email
Answer: AOL

5D clue: Brings into an email thread discreetly
Answer: BCCS

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CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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A proof-of-concept exploit for “Certighost,” a Windows Active Directory Certificate Services vulnerability, has been released that can allow authenticated attackers to potentially compromise a Windows domain.

Tracked as CVE-2026-54121, the vulnerability was fixed by Microsoft as part of the July 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates.

“An authenticated attacker could manipulate attributes associated with a machine account and obtain a certificate from Active Directory Certificate Services that allows authentication as that machine via PKINIT,” Microsoft explained.

If the attacker can target a domain controller account, Microsoft says they could authenticate as the domain controller and perform privileged Active Directory operations.

Security researchers H0j3n and Aniq Fakhrul reported the vulnerability to Microsoft on May 14, 2026, with Microsoft fixing the flaw in the July security updates.

Last week, the researchers publicly disclosed the technical details regarding the vulnerability, including the release of an exploit that can be used to gain domain-level administrative capabilities.

“Certighost is an Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) vulnerability that allowed a low-privileged domain user to impersonate a Domain Controller and achieve domain compromise in the tested AD CS configuration,” reads the researchers’ technical writeup.

Abusing the AD CS chase mechanism

Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) is Microsoft’s public key infrastructure for Windows domains and is used to issue certificates for authentication and secure communications.

During certificate-based authentication, the domain controller verifies which Active Directory account the certificate belongs to and then issues Kerberos credentials.

Certighost affects a fallback mechanism used by AD CS during certificate enrollment requests, which the researchers refer to as a “chase,” that uses two certificate request values:

• cdc, or Client DC, identifies the server the Certification Authority should contact.

• rmd, or Remote Domain, identifies the account the CA should search for.

When both attributes are supplied, the CA connects to the server specified in the cdc value and searches for the specified rmd.

However, systems previously did not verify that the server supplied through the attacker-controlled cdc value was a legitimate domain controller.

This allowed an attacker to run rogue SMB, LSA, and LDAP services, direct the CA to the attacker-controlled system, and return false directory information for a targeted machine account.

In the attack demonstrated by the researchers, a low-privileged user first creates a machine account, which is permitted under the default ms-DS-MachineAccountQuota configuration.

“A machine account created through the default ms-DS-MachineAccountQuota setting is a valid domain principal,” reads the report.

“This allowed the attacker-controlled chase endpoint to satisfy the authentication checks needed for the CA to continue, even though it was not the Domain Controller being impersonated.”

The attacker then submits a certificate request that directs the CA to the rogue services and targets a domain controller account. Because the CA trusts the identity information returned by the attacker-controlled services, it issues a certificate that can be used to authenticate as that domain controller and perform Active Directory operations.

The released certighost.py proof-of-concept automates this process by using the certificate to authenticate through PKINIT as the targeted domain controller, saving the resulting Kerberos credentials to a .ccache file and extracting the account’s NT hash.

The researchers then demonstrated using the saved Kerberos credentials with Impacket’s secretsdump tool to perform a DCSync attack and retrieve the krbtgt account’s credentials.

“A Domain Controller account has directory replication rights. With the resulting Kerberos credential, the attacker can request account secrets, including the krbtgt secret,” explained the researchers.

Microsoft fixed the vulnerability as part of the July Patch Tuesday updates by adding validation to this chase process.

The CA now verifies that the server specified in the cdc attribute maps to a legitimate domain controller in Active Directory and confirms that the returned identity matches the expected account. 

For admins who cannot install the July security updates, the researchers say that you can disable the optional chase fallback using the following commands:

certutil -setreg policy\EditFlags -EDITF_ENABLECHASECLIENTDC
Restart-Service CertSvc -Force

However, the researchers stress that this workaround is only a temporary mitigation and has not been fully tested in production environments. Therefore, admins should prioritize installing the latest security updates as soon as possible.

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Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next stage of growth.

On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for India — and priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription.

The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year.

That scale, coupled with India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made it the first market where Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale,” Green said. “The technical competency of the country and the engineering talent that already exists make it a very natural fit.”

India has emerged as one of the world’s largest software developer hubs. Earlier this year, GitHub said that the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the U.S., with more than two million joining in 2026 alone.

Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, alongside cloud agents, its iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The startup said the plan is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offers without upgrading to its full Pro subscription.

The lower-priced plan is intended to broaden access rather than replace Cursor’s flagship offering, Green said. Unlike the $20-a-month Pro subscription, Start does not include access to frontier AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK.

The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Green told TechCrunch that Cursor would use multiple checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available only to individual users in the country, including measures to deter people from accessing the plan through virtual private networks (VPNs).

Cursor is not alone in tailoring its pricing for India. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year as global AI companies compete for users in one of the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.

While Cursor Start is initially limited to India, Green told TechCrunch that the startup could expand localized pricing to other markets if the model proves successful.

“We will continue to do everything we can to fuel the demand and serve those clients that are using us,” Green said. “Now, if this model proves that we could take it to other markets, perhaps we will. But I think it’d be crazy to say we would never do it elsewhere.”

OpenAI provides one precedent for this strategy, having launched its sub-$5 ChatGPT Go in India before expanding the lower-priced subscription to other markets.

In addition to the localized pricing strategy, Cursor is also expanding its presence in India through new hires. Green told TechCrunch that the startup recently hired its first salesperson in India and expects another leader to join in Delhi. The company is also building out its a government affairs office, alongside three technical customer support hires, as it expands its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its early stages in India, Green said, where adoption has so far been driven largely by individual developers, startups, and universities. He said Cursor sees significant opportunities in sectors including banking and large enterprises as it expands its local sales efforts.

Green said, the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He said the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.

Cursor’s India expansion comes a little over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal, following SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3. However, SpaceX has been partnered with Cursor since April to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI.”

Green said Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes and that the company’s India expansion plans were already in motion before the deal. Once the acquisition closes, however, Green said SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.

Twenty-eight years after a honey bear and a red-crested bird first scrambled across Spiral Mountain, a fresh batch of Unreal Engine 5 footage has arrived that makes the wait for an official return feel almost unbearable. François Montagud, the same creator who previously rebuilt Doom 3 in the engine for his portfolio, has posted seven uninterrupted minutes of his Banjo-Kazooie fan remake. It will never ship. You cannot download it. Yet the short video already does more to answer the quiet question hanging over the series than any corporate teaser has managed in years.

Montagud’s idea with this one was to bring back the original game’s charm while also incorporating all of the improvements that modern hardware would provide. The end result is that the grass swings in the breeze, the leaves catch the light in a realistic way, and the rock faces suddenly have a degree of detail that the old N64 games couldn’t match. The lighting is stunning, casting shadows that stretch and shrink as Banjo moves around, and you can see how clean the water is, whereas the old cartridge merely hinted at how good it could appear. The environments feel lived-in rather than thrown together.

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The camera follows the duo through some big open areas as well as some tighter spots, and you can still see Banjo trudging along in that typical manner, while Kazooie, of course, bursts out of the backpack at the appropriate times, and leaping around still produces all of those cheery little “woohoo”s and “wheeee”s that you have always enjoyed. When they go underwater, the soundtrack turns to bubbles and muted sounds, which is actually very convincing.

Vegetation is arguably the most improved, because plants and trees no longer sit there like flat billboards; they have volume. Light passes through the leaves, creating all these gorgeous soft patterns on the ground. The far hills have a lot more texture, yet it doesn’t take away from the game’s gentle, storybook appeal. The color scheme is still warm and inviting, and the balance is perfect. None of it has been pushed too far into photorealism, which would clash with Banjo’s nicely rounded design or Gruntilda’s appropriate cartoon menace. That’s significant because it helps the game feel like it belongs in this universe.

Montagud has been open about this, stating that he did it for his portfolio and that it would most likely remain offline, similar to his Doom 3 work. There are no plans for a public build, but this does not diminish the footage’s effect. Fans who have been waiting since Nuts & Bolts, through the Smash Bros. debut, and through the numerous speculations finally have a tangible visual reference for what a properly done remake could look like.
[Source]

The end-of-cycle updates are often devoid of anything user-facing, but that doesn’t mean you should delay updating to visionOS 26.6. Security patches and preparation for Siri AI are worth the update.

Not every operating system update is going to have some flashy headlining feature. As we await the OS 27 releases in the fall, the OS 26 cycle is still getting needed updates.

Apple has released visionOS 26.6 today alongside the other operating systems with minor changes. The release notes don’t mention anything beyond the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements.

The release build for visionOS 26.6 is number 23O770.

Even though users won’t get any new user-facing features, there has been some evidence that Apple will begin indexing users’ devices before releasing Siri AI in September. The index would occur in the background and not be accessible to the user in visionOS 26, but would be ready for visionOS 27.

Indexing every piece of data available across all of a user’s devices is time-consuming and can affect performance. It is also not an ideal situation given that users hoping to try the new Siri AI might be disappointed to find errors when their data isn’t indexed.

Outside of that, there isn’t anything of note in visionOS 27. Since the update offers the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements, it is best to install the update as soon as is reasonable.

It is rather refreshing that, in an era of artificial intelligence and faceless machine made music, there is not only interest in, but genuine demand for, a multidisc, 118 track boxed set dedicated to recordings by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” including four previously unreleased alternate takes.

Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, The Complete Paramount Recordings 1923 to 1928 promises improved sound while offering a compelling portrait of this underappreciated artist. The set also includes a 100 page book featuring unpublished photographs, detailed biographies, notes for each track, news clippings, period advertisements, and a complete discography.

A pioneer on many levels, Rainey was a successful Black female musician who maintained control over her work in an industry that continues to exploit and mislead artists. The official materials accompanying the set explain:

“By the time Paramount signed her in 1923, she had the standing to negotiate on her own terms. She managed her own career for nearly thirty years and, according to registered copyrights, wrote or co wrote at least a third of what she recorded, at a time when almost no performer, and few women anywhere in the business, held that kind of control.”

Related Reviews:

While collectors understandably prize original 78 RPM recordings such as these, the reality is that discs produced before tape and digital technology, during the nascent and effectively direct to disc era of recorded music, are exceptionally rare. It is therefore especially encouraging to see this music preserved and improved through the latest technology and restoration expertise. Although the original discs have survived for more than a century, no doubt because of careful collectors, they will eventually deteriorate.

Featuring audio restoration by engineer Doug Benson, the set compiles the best surviving version of each 78 RPM side, as the individual recordings were known. Modern demixing software apparently does not work particularly well with early acoustic recordings, which account for roughly half of this collection, so the producers instead chose to remaster the material while remaining faithful to the sound of the original releases. Some surface noise is inevitable, but preserving it ultimately helps retain the music’s overall fidelity.

So how does it sound, you ask? While the label could not send me the entire boxed set for review, I did receive a very useful 22 song advance sampler CD that provides a strong overview. In short, it is highly enjoyable and, considering that these recordings are now roughly 100 years old, the sound quality is remarkably good. Do not expect Abbey Road by The Beatles or the latest Billie Eilish album, but this remains a vivid and authentic listening experience.

The recordings appear to be in remarkably good condition, given their age and scarcity. The music itself is often astonishing, particularly in its explicit, honest, and direct treatment of sexuality and independence on songs such as the groundbreaking “Prove It on Me,” “Shave ’Em Dry,” and “Dead Drunk Blues.”

Available now from Black Swan Records, named in tribute to the pioneering Black owned label founded in the 1920s, the set also reflects an important historical connection. J. Mayo Williams, who distributed the original Black Swan label, became Paramount’s recording director during the year Rainey signed with the company. Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, The Complete Paramount Recordings 1923 to 1928 can be ordered through the official website or Jazzology for $125.

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Music

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc.  You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

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Apple has released macOS 26.6 to the public, but don’t expect much in the way of big changes to features this time around.

Apple has concluded its beta testing program for updates to its current-gen operating systems. After five developer betas and a release candidate, it has now shipped macOS Tahoe 26.6.

At the same time, Apple has also brought out updates for earlier macOS versions. There are updates available for macOS Sequoia 15.7.8 and macOS Sonoma 14.7.7.

As usual for any system update, it is advisable to install the update, due to Apple including various bug fixes, performance improvements, and security refinements. However, unlike the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta program, you’re not going to see any real feature-based additions.

Instead, users may be forgiven for not seeing any real updates to macOS 26.6 at all. However, release notes for the betas and the RC edition show that there are some changes.

The release notes for the RC build mention some small improvements, including the deprecation of encrypted HFS+, which won’t be supported in macOS 28.

It also resolves a problem with deprecation notifications where it incorrectly identifies an app as Intel-only. This occurred when a system plugin loader like the Color Picker loads x86 code into the host process.

HealthKit also adjusted temporally-weighted average statistics queries for discrete quantity types, such as resting heart rate. It was occasionally returning high values in cases when sample times overlapped.

For Messages, the build fixes HDR screenshots that can appear garbled when sent to other users.

How to update to macOS 26.6

To update, open System Preferences, then General, followed by Software Update. If there is a software update available, select to install it.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI, creators of the increasingly famous “Kimi K” family of powerful, open AI models, today released the full weights for its largest and most performant version yet — Kimi K3. But enterprises evaluating the model should read the attached custom Kimi K3 usage license as carefully as the benchmark charts.

VentureBeat previously covered Kimi K3 when it debuted through Moonshot’s hosted API earlier this month, including its 2.8 trillion-parameter architecture, one million-token context window and frontier benchmark performance. Today’s announcement completes that rollout with the release of the full model weights, a 47-page technical report documenting its training innovations and obstacles, and much of the infrastructure required to run the model independently.

That includes the complete 2.8 trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, inference infrastructure, optimized attention kernels, MoE communication libraries and deployment components aimed at researchers and enterprise developers who want to self-host the system rather than consume it exclusively through an API.

Moonshot is also releasing implementation support for ecosystems including vLLM and SGLang, alongside a technical report detailing the architectural innovations behind the model, including Kimi Delta Attention, Attention Residuals and Stable LatentMoE. Together, those techniques underpin what the company describes as the world’s first open 3T-class model, activating 104 billion parameters from a pool of 896 experts while supporting native multimodal reasoning and a one million-token context window.

While Kimi K3’s license grants broad rights to developers and even enterprises to download, modify and deploy the model for commercial purposes — a win for those seeking low-cost, frontier-level AI they can control and run offline — it also imposes some added obligations on larger companies and AI service providers not found in traditional open-source licenses like Apache 2.0 or MIT.

The key restrictions enterprises should understand

Here’s the text of the new Kimi K3 License in full:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person (the “Licensee”) obtaining a copy of this software — including the model weights, parameters, configuration files, inference and training code, and associated documentation (collectively, the “Software”) — to deal in the Software without restriction. This includes, without limitation, the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software; to run, deploy, fine-tune, or otherwise modify the Software and create derivative works from it; and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, in each case subject to the following conditions:

1. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Licensee’s use of the Software must comply with applicable laws and regulations.

2. “Model as a Service” means giving a third party access to language model inference or fine-tuning (e.g., via API) in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data. This does not include (a) end-user products with model capabilities solely embedded within specific features or harnesses, or (b) mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.

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If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.

3. If the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of the Licensee’s commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, “Kimi K3” must be prominently displayed on the user interface of such product or service.

4. The requirements set forth in Sections 2 and 3 do not apply to: (a) internal use of the Software, defined as any use that does not make the Software, its outputs, or its underlying capabilities available to third parties; or (b) any use of the Software accessed through Moonshot AI’s official products or certified inference partners.

The most significant clause is 2., as it requires a separate commercial license from companies earning $20 million in annual revenue and operating what Moonshot calls a “Model as a Service,” which it defines as “giving a third party access to language model inference or fine-tuning (e.g., via API) in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data” but not ” end-user products with model capabilities solely embedded within specific features or harnesses” or “mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.”

That would seem to allow for free use of the model for most non-tech focused enterprises: banks and consumer brands seeking to use it as a front-end chatbot or customer service agent should be fine, since they’re not using Kimi K3 as a “Model as a Service.” But firms like they hyperscalers or startups offering model training tools might fall under the commercial license terms.

The wording is further notable because it does not limit the revenue calculation to products built on Kimi K3.

Instead, it references the aggregate revenue of the licensee and its affiliates, potentially bringing even smaller companies that are part of larger parents into the requirement that they must commercially license the model from Moonshot, pending the parent firm generates revenue of $20 million or more per year as is using it somewhere, in some capacity, as a “Model as a Service.”

Regardless of this requirement, in clause 3, the license also requires attribution once a commercial deployment reaches significant scale:

“If the Software… is used for any of the Licensee’s commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars in monthly revenue, ‘Kimi K3’ must be prominently displayed on the user interface.”

For enterprise software vendors, AI copilots and consumer applications, that branding requirement may prove just as significant as the revenue threshold. Companies that typically abstract away the underlying model may instead need to disclose it directly within their products.

But, if your enterprise is sticking to using Kimi K3 internally as an employee tool for information retrieval, creating spreadsheets and documents, or answering employee questions, Moonshot offers a significant carve out, stating that clauses 2 and 3 “do not apply to: (a) internal use of the Software, defined as any use that does not make the Software, its outputs, or its underlying capabilities available to third parties.”

Developers immediately zeroed in on the license

The licensing provisions quickly became one of the dominant topics of discussion following the release of the model weights.

AI researcher Nathan Lambert, previously the co-leader of the Olmo family of open models at AI startup Ai2, summarized the issue in a post on X:

“Kimi K3 license. It’s inspired by MIT but distinctly non-commercial, where any company making over $20M/yr must get a specific commercial deal (and display Kimi K3 if over 100M users or $20M/mo revenue).”

Lambert’s assessment reflected what many developers noticed as they dug into the newly published license: while Kimi K3 offers unrestricted access to the model weights for researchers, startups and many enterprises, commercial obligations become significantly more complex for larger organizations.

The broader community reaction was largely positive toward the release itself. Developers praised Moonshot for publishing not only the weights but also supporting infrastructure, including attention kernels, MoE communication libraries and agent tooling, viewing the release as a significant contribution to the open-weight AI ecosystem.

Others highlighted the rapid pace of ecosystem support, with inference projects such as vLLM and SGLang, along with cloud providers and infrastructure partners, moving quickly to support Kimi K3 deployments.

At the same time, discussion centered on two practical caveats. One was licensing: many developers argued the model is more accurately described as open weight than fully open source, given the commercial conditions attached to larger deployments. The other was operational.

At roughly 1.5 TB of model weights, Kimi K3 remains a system aimed primarily at well-resourced organizations capable of operating large-scale inference infrastructure, even as reports emerged of successful deployments on clusters of consumer RTX 5090 GPUs.

Not the first to customize open AI licensing

Moonshot is far from the first frontier AI developer to embrace an “open, but not completely open” licensing strategy.

Meta’s Llama family, for example, has long been distributed under its own community license requiring a commercial agreement for those building with the model and exceeding 700 million monthly users, rather than a traditional open-source software license. Other frontier model developers have likewise adopted bespoke licensing terms governing redistribution, commercial use or attribution.

Kimi K3 follows that broader trend, albeit with a different mechanism. Rather than broadly restricting redistribution, Moonshot ties certain commercial rights to company scale.

Organizations operating a Model-as-a-Service business above specified revenue thresholds must negotiate a separate commercial agreement, while the largest commercial deployments must visibly attribute Kimi K3 within their products.

For enterprises, the practical implication is that “open weights” and “open source” are becoming increasingly distinct concepts. Downloading and modifying frontier models may be straightforward; understanding the legal conditions attached to commercial deployment increasingly is not.

What enterprise leaders should do next

For CIOs, chief AI officers and engineering leaders, the first step is to determine how the organization intends to use Kimi K3 before evaluating its technical performance.

If the model will remain entirely inside the organization—for example, supporting developers, researchers, legal teams or internal productivity workflows—the published license appears substantially more permissive. Those deployments may qualify as internal use under Moonshot’s terms, avoiding the commercial licensing provisions that apply to customer-facing AI services.

Organizations planning to build products on top of Kimi K3 should take a different approach.

Legal, engineering and product leaders should determine whether the planned deployment constitutes “Model as a Service” under the license, whether the company or its affiliates exceed the $20 million revenue threshold, and whether future growth could trigger the requirement to negotiate a commercial agreement with Moonshot.

Companies expecting products to reach more than 100 million monthly active users—or more than $20 million in monthly revenue—should also evaluate the license’s attribution requirement and how it fits with existing branding, contractual commitments and white-label offerings.

More broadly, Kimi K3 illustrates a transition taking shape across frontier AI. As the industry’s most capable models increasingly become available as downloadable weights instead of exclusively through hosted APIs, enterprises will need to evaluate licensing terms with the same rigor they apply to benchmarks, security reviews and infrastructure planning.

The next competitive battleground may not simply be whether AI models are open or closed, but the increasingly nuanced legal frameworks that determine who can commercialize them, under what conditions and at what scale.

T-Mobile’s Monday outage is officially over. After thousands of customers spent hours dealing with dropped signals and iPhones stuck in SOS mode, the carrier confirmed that service has been fully restored.

So what exactly happened?

Reports started flooding into Downdetector around 4 PM ET, and within an hour, more than 140,000 users had flagged an issue. Most people reported they are receiving no signal or a dead mobile connection.

The trouble didn’t stop at T-Mobile’s own network either. StatusGator confirmed that MVNOs like Mint Mobile and Boost Mobile, which run on T-Mobile’s towers, also felt the impact.

Things got bad enough that plenty of iPhone owners watched their devices switch to Emergency SOS mode, and Google searches for “SOS mode” spiked as people tried to figure out what was happening. New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles saw the heaviest concentration of complaints, according to Downdetector’s outage map. 

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Over on Reddit and X, posts about the outage blew up, racking up thousands of comments as users traded theories and potential fixes.

Is everything back to normal now?

After first saying its teams were “actively working” on the issue, T-Mobile followed up with a full resolution update on X. “We have fully restored service for all customers and sincerely apologize for the difficulties to those who experienced network impacts today,” the company said. “At T-Mobile, we know that customers rely on us to stay connected to what matters most, and we appreciate their understanding as we prioritized resolution.”

We have fully restored service for all customers and sincerely apologize for the difficulties to those who experienced network impacts today. At @TMobile, we know that customers rely on us to stay connected to what matters most, and we appreciate their understanding as we…

— T-Mobile Newsroom (@tmobilenews) July 28, 2026

T-Mobile still hasn’t shared what actually caused the outage in the first place, so we don’t know if this was a one-time hiccup or something worth keeping an eye on. For now, if your phone was stuck on SOS earlier today, a quick restart should get you back to full bars.

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